Caitlyn's Leg Belts

been playing a game called ‘vintage story’ lately which is literally a game made by a bunch of people who are mad as fuck about minecraft being an egregious piece of shit that doesn’t run worth a damn and breaks literally everything mod-related the moment anyone breathes on it

it straight up runs a million times better and doesn’t take 10 minutes to boot up while sounding like it wants to fry part of my hard drive like modded minecraft did. it genuinely looks a lot like minecraft in some respects but is absolutely a new thing and is made with modding in mind from the ground up so that everything doesn’t break immediately all the time. the core gameplay has a lot of stuff previously featured in minecraft mods, most notably terrafirmacraft, baked in from the start and part of the core gameplay loop to the point where there’s more an emphasis on neat survival stuff and involved crafting processes that actually feel like an accomplishment when you pull them off.

anyways this was all a leadup to me talking about the smithing process which i went through to get a copper sawblade which is pretty crucial for making wooden boards which are used in a lot of cool shit. the initial form of metalworking is mold-casting, where you melt down metal in a crucible on a firepit using something that can burn hot enough to accomplish that, most notably charcoal being a big example which needs you to make an actual charcoal pit and let it cook off overnight. you then pour it into molds of your choice. it’s how you get your first pickaxe and metal versions of the stone tools you’d been previously knapping out of flint and whatever else up until then. in this case i poured it into an ingot mold, which i then had to let cool off for a while before i could pull it out. it went into my forge, which i packed with charcoal and lit with a torch, and then i waited until it heated up enough to be glowing.

at that point i slapped it onto the anvil. the initial lump with that menu full of symbols is how you manipulate the mass. the green line voxels are the overall shape of the thing you’re making. the menu options let you manipulate the voxels and actually whack them from place to place with the intention of slotting them into the empty outlines. there’s even an option to just give it a big smack and spread out a clump of the voxels if you’re doing something big, and the last option is so you can carve off individual chunks to get rid of the excess and clean things up near the end. the second to last pic is the completed sawblade in my hand before i got a handle onto it.

anyways vintage story is neat as fuck and if the sound of ‘modded minecraft but not shitty and awful to try and run’ sounds dope then i rec checking it out because the smithing is literally just one thing out of a myriad of neat processes in the game. there’s even a burgeoning mod community and the devs put out a voxel model creator to help people make mods for the game!